


Half Moon

by DesertScribe



Category: Jackalope Wives Series - Ursula Vernon
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:33:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: After escorting Grandma Harken home from her fight against the Cold-king, the coyote turned up at the edge of her property every day for a week to see if she had changed her mind about dropping dead.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Half Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KalynaAnne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KalynaAnne/gifts).



After escorting Grandma Harken home from her fight against the Cold-king, the coyote turned up at the edge of her property every day for a week to see if she had changed her mind about dropping dead.

She might have been a little bit tempted to die on that first morning when she awoke to the reminder that injuries such as hers always hurt worse the day after you get them, but she could hear Anna's girl, clanking around, doing something in the kitchen. Wracked with pain or not, Grandma Harken was not about to let something like that continue unsupervised, not until she knew the girl knew how to properly treat a seasoned iron skillet, so she gingerly rolled her stiff and sore body out of bed, got dressed, and got on with the business of living.

As it turned out, Anna's girl, whose name was Mercy as if that weren't the most ironic name for any child of the desert, never mind one with so much of the desert in her as to be born with cholla ribs for bones, was making tea and porridge for breakfast and doing an acceptable job of both. Grandma Harken allowed the girl to continue. What she did not allow was for herself to crawl back into bed, not since she was already up and dressed and especially not after she caught a fleeting glimpse of a familiar canine shape through her back window. She forced herself to continue about her day as if nothing was overly wrong, just as she had forced herself to keep walking home the day before: slowly and carefully but deliberately and with determination. Stubbornness had always served her well as a survival tactic, and it continued to do so.

She made no mention of infirmity or thoughts of mortality to the coyote when, in the late evening, he came sauntering along the outside of the fence between her garden and the desert, bold as you please, to inquire after her continued wellbeing by the light of the last of the fading sunset.

"I'm doing well enough," Grandma Harken told the coyote from her own side of the fence, and her words were true enough. The split rails were too far apart to keep out anything other than maybe an extremely apathetic sheep, but nothing like that lived around here. However, it served its purpose as a demarcation line well enough by quietly highlighting the difference between garden plot and everything else in the world, and that was all she had ever wanted it for anyway. Anything else would have been futile in the face of determined wildlife or been more trouble to build and maintain than she had wanted to bother with.

"But I'm very hungry," wheedled the coyote.

"And you'll find ready food a lot faster if you go look for it elsewhere instead of waiting around here for something that seems less likely to happen today than it was yesterday," she said.

Mercy watched the interplay from a seat on the back porch, where Grandma Harken had told her to wait. If she got too close, the coyote might decide he wanted a formal introduction. Either humoring that kind of request or denying it held equal potential for all sorts of future trouble, so it was best to avoid it altogether. Grandma Harken was not sure if that kind of wariness was the kind of knowledge that would be inherent in Mercy's nature or not. She figured it was best not to take any changes so early in their acquaintance.

"I'll try again tomorrow," said the coyote. "Just in case you change your mind and die in the night."

Grandma Harken kept herself standing ramrod straight as she addressed the coyote. Not even the ache in her back was enough for her to risk the kind of splinters which the old wood of the fence would give anyone who dared to lean against it without the utmost caution. "If I die in the night, and that is an _if_ so big as to as to not be worth you trying your luck against it," she said as firmly but evenly, "then I intend to do so in my own bed. I know you are a scavenger of many talents, but last I heard, housebreaking was not among them."

"Maybe it isn't," the coyote said, his permanent canine smile never faltering. "Maybe you will live through the night after all," he continued, "but maybe you will then politely die in your garden the next morning, having used the last of your strength to step outside and under the branches of the palo verde tree where vultures would not see you."

"I intend to do the first part of that, but not the second," Grandma Harken said.

"I'll check again tomorrow anyway, just in case," the coyote said. "It would be un-neighborly not to." Then he turned and trotted away through the desert scrub before Grandma Harken could argue further.

Grandma watched the coyote until he was out of sight. Then she turned and re-joined Mercy on the back porch.

The rest of the evening passed without further interruptions or intrusions.

§

Getting up on the second morning after was a tiny bit easier than the first, and getting up on the third morning after was a tiny bit easier than the second, and so on, and so forth. Eventually, the coyote either gave up and left or made enough of a pretense of giving up to withdraw to wait for her demise from a less visible distance. Grandma Harken did not care which of those two options was more true. She was just glad to have the coyote gone enough to finally stop worrying Spook-cat beyond the little orange tom's usual baseline levels of fear of everything.

When the eighth day after Grandma Harken's confrontation with the Cold-king without any sign of waiting coyotes, she figured that the whole matter was finally at an end as far as she was concerned and her life could go back to being free of shapeshifters for a good long while. Less than a week after that, Grandma Harken learned just how wrong she was about that.

She awoke before dawn from a night of dreams of dancing to discover that she had kicked all of her blankets off of her bed in her sleep. That was a surprise, considering how she had been right about the things she had done to her hips being the kind of abuse which would need a long time to heal from. Regardless of whether it was constant restless motion or sudden flailing that had caused the disarray, either way the results should have been a disgruntled old woman's sore joints goading her back into wakefulness well before all of her bed clothing had the chance to slither over the edge of the mattress and down to the floor. However, that was not nearly as much of a surprise to Grandma Harken as the realization that she had not awakened as a disgruntled old woman but, rather, as a disgruntled old jackalope.

For a moment she simply stood there with her heart hammering while her long ears and twitching whiskers strained to detect any hint of a nearby enemy. No attack was forthcoming, magical or otherwise, and slowly, almost against her will, the thudding of her jackrabbit heart eased back towards a resting pace, allowing her to think about the situation with the human part of her mind instead of the wild animal part. She had a better sense for detecting magic in rabbit shape than she did as a human, all jackalopes did, and that sense was telling her that there was not anything new here, just herself with her old familiar jackrabbit scent with its threads of inherent magic and, a little farther away, the faint notion of Mercy sleeping in the next room and the delicate ties of power which anchored the girl to the desert like cactus roots.

The only out-of-place thread of power which Grandma Harken could discern was the almost undetectable whiff of magic like ice and pine, and that had been clinging to Grandma Harken's hair and skin for the better part of two weeks now. It lingered like the ghost of smoke from a bad cigar and was the only explanation for her current predicament: apparently that blast of magic which the Cold-king had hit her with had been even more potent than it had seemed at the time.

 _Of course a man like that would leave a mess that lasts longer than he does_ , Grandma thought sourly.

In her youth, she would have killed to get this form of hers back if matters had been that simple. Only the certainty that her target of choice would take the exact knowledge she needed to the grave with him kept her from killing. And then he had taken the knowledge to his grave without any help from her. And then, while still in her youth but not so young as before, she had stumbled across that secret hiding place containing her stolen skin, only to throw it away to rid herself of the temptation of throwing away everything else which she had come to value in life. And then in her old age she had gotten another chance and threw that one away too, because someone who her kin had wronged needed it more. And then she had gotten a brief taste of that other life thrown on her against her will but had been too busy fighting for her life to enjoy it.

And now here she was again, in fur and horns, this time with no enemy or other danger in sight, and all she could think was, _Goddamn it, how am I supposed to get today's work done while going around on four feet with no thumbs?_

The last time, her involuntary change had been undone by the death of the Cold-king, but if there was anything left to kill on that front (and Grandma Harken's gut, which was rarely wrong, said that there wasn't), she did not think she would ever be able to find it. Grandma had laundry to wash and vegetables to pickle today, but she would rather spend the rest of her probably short life as a jackrabbit too old to outrun predators than get caught up in the kind of tale that came of making a deal with a coyote, especially not when that deal would be for him to show her all the places he had used as a latrine in the past two weeks so she could try to destroy whatever worms or seeds might have survived the journey through. Not even Saint Anthony would have the patience for that sort of nonsense.

Then realization struck her, and she would have laughed if rabbits could laugh, because she could feel in her bones that today was the early hours of a day which would become a night of a half moon. She gave a squirm and, in a motion that not even five decades of lack of practice could render unfamiliar to her old flesh and bones, shed her rabbit skin.

It looked like she would be able to do her laundry and pickling today after all.

 _And after that?_ , Grandma Harken thought as she idly stroked along the head and neck area of the pelt in her hands, the same kind of gentle greeting stroking as she gave Spook-cat on the occasions when he re-emerged from hiding so well that she had begun thinking he might have disappeared for good. The only difference was that she could feel it both on the giving and receiving end. The skin and white fur were both thin with age but still soft and supple and whispered to her through her fingertips of a simpler existence out in the desert away from the trappings of human society. She was halfway there already.

Then again, she had always been halfway there. And if she put on her skin and abandoned everything for its whispers of freedom, she would still be only halfway there, just in a different way than before. Maybe she could have gone back to living as a jackalope if she had done so in her youth, but she wouldn't be able to do it now. Even if she weren't too old, she had become too human. Her worries about laundry and pickling proved that.

And even if she weren't too human, she had Mercy and, by extension, Anna to worry about. Eva might accept Grandma's disappearance with disappointed equanimity, but Anna would find a way to track down Grandma to wherever her jackalope legs had carried her and then have Words about teaching obligations left unfulfilled. That kind of conversation would be unwanted enough while both women were in human form. Grandma Harken didn't want to even think about it happening while she was small enough that only her ears reached past Anna's knee.

Even so, the call of the pelt and the desert was still awfully tempting.

There was no need to do anything rash, though. Nor was there any need to make any decisions that couldn't be taken back, not now and maybe not ever. Grandma Harken gave her rabbit pelt one more stroke and then carefully rolled it up and stowed it away in the cedar chest she used to keep the bugs away from her winter woolens. After a moment, she took the pelt out again and tested the sharpness of the horns with her fingertip, just because there were some bits of vanity you never grew out of however old you got. Satisfied that her horns had not been overly dulled by age, she put the pelt away for a second time.

With all that taken care of, Grandma Harken was finally able to push her remaining thoughts about the pelt to the back of her mind in favor of concerns which were lower stakes and more mundane but also more immediate. The potential for rewriting what she thought would be the plans for the rest of her life could wait. For now, she would worry about sticking to her plans for this particular day. Laundry and pickling were not tasks to be undertaken while distracted lest you endanger your future food supplies and/or your ability to go out in public without people pointing and laughing at how you'd accidentally turned all your white shirts pink.

§

Grandma Harken knew there would be no going back to sleep for her, not right then, but she was not going to continue stewing in her own thoughts. Instead, she got up, dressed, and then got an early start on making breakfast.

She and Mercy completed both the laundry and the pickling with daylight left to spare, even after a break for a leisurely lunch during the worst of the heat of the day. After the chores were finished and dinner was eaten, Grandma Harken took Mercy out into the desert, shooed away the couple of boys from town who were lurking up on the edge of the bluff. She and Marcy took the boys' seats on the ground while the boys themselves went slinking back home. Then, by the light of the half moon and a slightly enchanted campfire, Grandma Harken said, "Tonight, I'm gonna tell you about the jackalope wives, but not how anyone else you know would probably tell it."

Even if the story turned out to be one of those things Mercy knew from before birth through her connection to the desert, it wouldn't do any harm for her to hear it spoken out loud by someone who knew it firsthand and was willing to explain their part in the tale. Maybe this was the kind of teaching Anna had wanted for the girl, not about desert life or about ordinary human life but about navigating the overlap between the two which only existed for people like Grandma and Mercy. It was a start at least.

After that, Grandma Harken would continue to figure things out as she went along, just as she always had, with and without access to her jackrabbit skin. It had worked out well enough so far, so she figured that she might as well keep going.

**The End**


End file.
